


every bit of beating heart

by carrythesky



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Loneliness, On the Run, Spoilers for dds3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-27
Updated: 2018-10-27
Packaged: 2019-08-08 10:09:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16427351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carrythesky/pseuds/carrythesky
Summary: Karen runs.





	every bit of beating heart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [edourado](https://archiveofourown.org/users/edourado/gifts), [@thestarsbeyondthestorms](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=%40thestarsbeyondthestorms).



> Inspired by the prompts 'things you said with too many miles between us' and 'things you said on the phone at 4 am'

She’s had a bag packed since Fisk moved out of prison and into the penthouse. All she has to do is use it.

 

.

 

.

 

There are flowers, on the kitchen table. White roses. Not the ones he’d given her, but they may as well be. She can’t buy flowers anymore without thinking of him.

 

They catch her eye as she’s hugging Foggy, and she feels the breath leave her lungs, swooping out in the space between heartbeats. Tensile strength, she thinks. Kevin was taking AP Physics the year he died, the year she _killed him_. She remembers helping him study. Ultimate tensile strength, he’d recited from his flashcards, measured by the maximum amount of stress an object can withstand without breaking—

 

Karen leaves, and doesn’t look back.

 

.

 

.

 

She uses her credit card to buy a southbound bus ticket to Baltimore, hopes the paper trail will buy her a little time. Fisk and his goons have probably already started sniffing her out, but she’ll be long gone by the time they catch on.

 

She’s heard the Rockies are beautiful this time of year.

 

.

 

.

 

The plan is to lay low. The plan is to limit contact with other people, as much as possible. The plan is —

 

“This seat is — taken?”

 

Karen glances up. The woman staring down at her from the aisle reminds her sharply of Mrs. Cardenas — same toothy smile, same hopeful eyes, and Karen feels like her chest cavity has been scooped hollow.

 

“Uh — no,” she hears herself say. “Not taken.”

 

Karen left a lot behind in New York, but her inquisitive tendencies have stuck. It’s not long before she knows more than she probably should about her seatmate — Sofía Rosales, sixty-seven years young, three grandchildren with a fourth on the way. She talks with her hands and very kindly doesn’t laugh at Karen’s mangled Spanish. Karen likes her immediately, and that’s when the sirens start going off in her head, that’s when everything starts spiraling. She ruins everyone she touches, no matter her intentions, even when she tries to be kind and good, even when she tries to do the right thing it all goes wrong —

 

(That’s what you do, Karen. That’s what you do.)

 

She switches seats in the middle of the night and doesn’t talk to Mrs. Rosales again.

 

.

 

.

 

Karen ditched her phone before she left, but she has a few numbers memorized. Ellison, Matt, Foggy, home.

 

David Lieberman.

 

She’s not sure why his number stuck, but it’s there, burned into her hippocampus. Just one of the many details she learned about him while digging for info for Frank.

 

She has an hour to herself in the station in Columbus, where she’s transferring buses, so she slides into the nearest coffee shop and fidgets with the burner in her pocket, to give her hands something to do. Flips it open, then shut again. Open, shut. She thinks of the elevator — him leaning into her, closing his eyes and aligning his breath with hers, all those unsaid things in that quiet cocoon of space — and laughs aloud. And she sort of owes him, right? For saving her life. She owes it to him to let him know it wasn’t for nothing, that she is, in fact, still breathing.

 

There’s an open single seat in the very back of the new bus. She sinks into it, waits until they’re on the highway again before punching in David’s number with shaking fingers.

 

“Hello?”

 

It takes a second for her lungs to catch up with her brain. “Hello, David?” she croaks. “Is this David Lieberman?”

 

There’s a slight pause. “Who’s calling?”

 

She should hang up, now. Trash the burner, never, ever, do something this fucking stupid ever again —

 

“Karen?”

 

Every muscle in her body tenses. He sounds uncertain, but there’s something about his voice, even over the phone. Something layered beneath. Karen doesn’t know much about this guy, but he seems like the type of person who wouldn’t ask a question he doesn’t already know the answer to.

 

She blows out a breath. “Yes. Jesus, you’re good.”

 

“Holy shit. Holy— shit, it’s good to hear from you.”

 

“I guess you know why I’m calling, then.”

 

“Yeah,” David huffs out a laugh, “yeah, I have a pretty good idea. I gotta tell you, Karen, our mutual friend has been, ahh, more of a pain in the ass than usual, as of late. I’m sure you can relate.”

 

She’s gripping the phone so tightly her tendons are starting to burn. There’s breath somewhere in her body, right? Beneath her ribs, maybe, threaded through the struts of bone. She just has to find it. Just take a breath, Karen, just one.

 

“Our — friend,” she says carefully, past the lump in her trachea. “I need you to let him know that I’m okay. I’m just taking some time, away from the city. But I’m alright. If you could tell Fra —” she squeezes her eyes shut. “If you could tell him that, I would really appreciate it.”

 

“Karen, hey —”

 

“Thanks, David,” she says, and hangs up.

 

.

 

.

 

She’s fine.

 

.

 

.

 

After two nights on the bus, Karen decides she needs some actual sleep. She finds the cheapest motel she can and collapses once she’s in the room, asleep before she can even take off her coat or shoes.

 

She dreams about Fisk, then Kevin, and jolts awake long before the sun comes up.

 

There’s a pad of paper in the nightstand. _You’re okay_ , she scribbles out, over and over.

 

You’re okay.

 

.

 

.

 

He’s never far from her thoughts. She knew she wouldn’t miss him like she misses Matt and Foggy — he exists in her mind in splinters, a kaleidoscope of sounds and images and feelings that she can’t quite piece together. She knows who Frank Castle is from a distance. It’s when she looks closer that everything gets blurry.

 

.

 

.

 

She cycles through her burners. The one she’d used to call David stays in the bottom of her duffel. She hasn’t turned it back on since then, but she can’t make herself get rid of it, either.

 

She calls Foggy, once, in a moment of weakness. The line rings and rings and she hangs up before he can answer.

 

She wonders if loneliness can actually kill someone.

 

.

 

.

 

They ride the bus with her, sometimes.

 

Kevin pops up the most. The first time, he’s hunched over his guitar, the one mom had given him before she died. He’s picking the strings randomly, strumming chords to life that Karen swears she’s never heard before.

 

“Stop showing off,” she jabs.

 

“Hey, it’s not my fault you don’t have a musical bone in your body,” he smiles, not looking up.

 

“Ouch. Where’d you learn to be so mean, kid?”

 

Now he snaps his eyes up. “I’m not a kid.”

 

You are, she thinks. You’re just a kid, you’re so, so young. Your whole life is there, just waiting for you to fill it —

 

Paxton visits occasionally. He never says anything, just sits and stares out the window. They’re driving through Kansas now, nothing but grass and plains for the past day and a half. Karen wonders if her father is thinking what she’s thinking when he looks out, if he’s wondering what it would be like walk off into the sun and dust, feet to the horizon.

 

“Hey.”

 

(It says something about the state of her life that Frank's voice does something to her, even when it’s in her head.)

 

“You found me,” she says, not turning. She sees him in the window, his reflection distorted slightly.

 

“Thought I wouldn’t?”

 

“Hoped.”

 

He rumbles a laugh between his teeth. “You know me better than that, Miss Page.”

 

“Why,” she says, “why are you always here?”

 

“I just got here, Karen, what’re you —”

 

“I mean, in my life.” She looks at him, finally, taking his face in like she always does in case this is the last time she sees him. “Every time you leave, you come back. I’m tired of trying to figure out why, Frank, so if you could just fucking tell me —”

 

His hand is warm as he slips it through hers. She can almost feel the calluses on his fingers. “You mean somethin’ to me,” he says. “Don’t you know that?”

 

He’s gone, when she looks again.

 

.

 

.

 

She runs until she hits mountains. Denver seems as good a place as any to stop, at least for a little while. There’s people here, not like New York, but enough for her to blend in, go unnoticed. Just one face in a million.

 

She finds an apartment and scoops up a night shift at a local bakery. It feels good, working with her hands. Making things instead of ripping them apart.

 

Time passes. Karen tries counting the days at first, but soon loses track. Weeks, months. She’s still here. She’s still here.

 

.

 

.

 

 

 _I killed him,_ she growls at Wilson Fisk, again and again. Sometimes it’s him. Sometimes it’s Kevin, or Ben, or Mrs. Cardenas, or—

 

She’s not sure she knows who she’s hiding from, anymore.

 

.

 

.

 

It had to happen, eventually. A material can only be stretched so far until —

 

.

 

.

 

She shouldn’t do it. She knows —but she’s starting to forget people. The color of their eyes, the sound of their voices. She just needs something, something to remind her she used to have people in her life who knew her real name, who cared she existed.

 

She calls home.

 

A strange voice answers. “Hello?”

 

“Uh—” she sputters, thrown off. “Hi, I’m — I’m looking for Paxton Page?”

 

“Shit, I really need to get this number changed. He moved, about, oh, a month and a half ago? Doesn’t live here anymore.”

 

The pit of her stomach turns to ice. “He — he moved? He’s gone?”

 

“Yeah. Think he said he was going out of state, too. Didn’t leave a forwarding address, though. Sorry I can’t be of more help.”

 

Karen sinks, melts into the floor, lets the phone slide out from between her fingers. Stupid, stupid. He told her himself, all those years ago. I don’t want you here, Karen. She thought, maybe, maybe if enough time passed, maybe the wound would start to scab over. Maybe he’d change his mind, and they could try to be some semblance of a family again.

 

I don’t want you here, he said, but what he meant was —

 

I don’t want you.

 

“Fuck,” she whispers to herself, the empty room, the universe. Anyone who’s listening. The answering silence is what finally does it. She unravels, slow tears at first that quickly devolve into throaty, heaving sobs that rock up the length of her spine, fan out across her shoulders, rip through bone and marrow and every little thing that’s holding her together.

 

She cries until she can’t anymore.

 

.

 

.

 

Karen blinks and the world pieces itself together. Floor, beneath her, every muscle in her body protesting loudly as she rolls into supine. Her brain feels like it’s bursting out of her skull. She must have slept here. It’s still dark — just before four a.m., the clock on her nightstand says.

 

C’mon, Karen. Sit up. Just sit up. It’s muscle memory, after that. Stand, shuffle over to the sink, splash water on face. Cross the room, dig through the duffel in the back of the closet. Find his burner.

 

It’s muscle memory, switching it on.

 

He calls less than a minute later.

 

“Karen? Karen —”

 

“Hey, Frank,” she says.

 

He makes a fractured noise on the other end. “She’s here, Lieberman, she’s — christ, Karen, you’re here, I can’t — you’re okay?”

 

“No,” she says with a low laugh. “But I’m here.”

 

“I’ll take it,” he says. “It’s — shit, it’s good to hear your voice.”

 

“I’m sorry, Frank.” She sinks her fingers into her hair. “I’m really sorry.”

 

“Don’t do that. You don’t do that with me, you got it? Jesus, Karen, I — I thought that was it. Thought—” he goes quiet, and she can almost see him tilting his head down, working his jaw. She can almost imagine wrapping her arms around him, her chin on his shoulder and her hands in his hair, the smell of him, how he feels pressed against her, warm and safe.

 

“I miss you,” she says.

 

She hears him pull a ragged breath between his teeth. “You have no idea, Page.”

 

Her fingers are wet, when she swipes at her face. “I don’t — know what to do. I don’t know what to do, Frank, please tell me, because I can’t do this, I can’t.”

 

“I’m here, Karen.” His voice swells, crests like a wave, and she realizes he’s crying, too. “Right here, yeah? I’m here, always.”

 

Just take a breath, Karen. Just breathe.

 

In, out, in again — and across the miles, she can hear Frank breathing, with her.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on tumblr! @carry-the-sky


End file.
